For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,745,887 to Raymond Heidel, et al. indicates a bill acceptor for use on a gaming table that comprises a validator for identifying characteristics of a note passed through the validator by a transportation system, and a cash box mounted below a surface of the gaming table for receiving valid notes at the end of the path through the validator and for storing valid notes. A bill guard attached to gaming table is positioned near bill acceptor to minimize the possibility that a player could reach onto gaming table and remove notes as they were being fed into or rejected from bill acceptor. Bill guard can be made of a translucent material such as high impact plastic to allow the dealer and players to watch bills through bill guard as they are inserted into or rejected from validator. However, once bills are inserted into inside of bill acceptor, players cannot observe, confirm, exchange or withdraw the bills inserted into the validator.
On the other hand, Japanese Patent Disclosure No. 2005-275876 to T. Ohori, et al. demonstrates an automated teller machine having an inner escrow for temporarily retaining bills received within the machine. However, no one can directly observe the bills retained in the escrow, and to reconfirm the bills in the escrow, a conveyor has to be driven in the adverse direction to thereby return the bills from the escrow to a bill reject slot of the machine. When the bills already returned to bill reject slot are found to be no problem, same operations must be repeated while inserting bills into a bill inlet. Also, in view of the security commitment, no escrow can be provided in a position within one's grasp of this machine.
An object of the present invention is to provide a document handler for table games capable of, visibly to players and removably from outside and temporarily, accumulating documents in an escrow chamber after evaluating authenticity of the documents before stowage of the documents in a stacker. Another object of the present invention is to provide a document handler for table games capable of visually confirming any problem or question raised on collected documents for security of the documents' authenticity, transparency and fairness of games. Still another object of the present invention is to provide a document handler for table games that may convey documents from a deposit chamber to an escrow chamber through a validator to confirm the documents' authenticity and further may convey the documents from the escrow chamber to a stacker.